Jonathan Coulter (70 or 71) is a PSC activist. Moreover he is a member of the secret Palestine Live group in Facebook that is riddled with antisemitism. He initiated a judicial review of the IPSO decision regarding the Times and Sunday Times coverage of a meeting in Parliament hosted by Jenny Tonge in October 2016. A meeting that saw full-on Holocaust Denial and blame of Zionists for the Holocaust. He lost……Coulter thinks ‘the press is bullying people in such a way that they are reluctant to speak up on Israel/Palestine’. And he thinks that the reason MPs join Friends of Israel organisations is because they are “scared of being done over by the Jewish Chronicle”. You get the picture………….

Tim Lllewellyn (78) was the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent for ten years. He thinks the Zionist movement is an ‘alien polity’ which has ‘penetrated the British government and British institutions‘. He often sees Jews under the bed …

So do you think these three auspicious scholars conclude that antisemitism on the left is a problem? No prizes for the right answer: “No”. Campaigners against antisemitism in Labour are said to be bent on ‘creating a minefield for critics of Israel’ and on ‘ensuring that Jeremy Corbyn never becomes Prime Minister.’ In short, we’re in the world of Antisemitism Denial.

Let’s take their sham study apart. Their first section is on statistical data. They reproduce a Pew Research chart which shows that negative views of Jews is less in the UK than in six other EU Member States. The problem is that the research just tested negative views of Jews in the country of the respondents – nothing about Israel – so the definition of antisemitism was wrong. The correct definition is the widely accepted IHRA definition.

Then they use the infamous Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) survey which – they claim – shows ‘strong antisemitic attitudes’ on the left as no higher than the right (apart from the ultra-right). Wrong, see my analysis of the JPR Survey here. Again, the definition of antisemitism that the JPR used was wrong – astonishingly for a respected research organisation at the heart of the UK Jewish community. When it comes to anti-Israel attitudes, the proportion of the ‘very left-wing’ holding at least one anti-Israel attitude (seven out of eight of which are antisemitic) is around 78-79%, way above that for the general population (47%).

As I said at the time, the research has provided a wide open goal for Corbyn. I take no pleasure at all from being proved right.

Coulter et al go on to cite the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer. It is true that agreement with non-Israel based antisemitic statements is found to be higher on the right than on the left. And that the proportion not endorsing any (non-Israel based) antisemitic statement is higher in Labour (68%) than in the Conservatives (60%). But look at this chart from the survey (the response is of Jews). I wonder why they didn’t include it 🙂

They then go on to cite the Home Affairs Select Committee’s 2016 Report on Antisemitism:

Possibly that Report predated the CAA’s monitoring of antisemitism in political parties – but it’s simply wrong. Labour has seven times more cases than the next nearest Party. No doubt the Labour MPs on the Committee insisted this passage went into the Report; one wonders what Chuka Umunna MP would say now, after leaving Labour for ChangeUK.

They turn now to Home Office data and suggest that Jews should be thankful that ‘only’ 10% of antisemitic crimes involve violence, versus 30% in the case of all racial or religious hate crime. Daniel Allington has taken this one on. It is perfectly possible that Jews face so many non-violent antisemitic crimes that the violent element is compressed down to 10%. Hardly evidence that Jews should ‘stop complaining’.

Next the three luminaries suggest that Jews have it easy (in terms of likelihood to be the victim of a hate crime) than a BAME person. They provide no data so it’s impossible to check their results without searching it out.

Next they quote from a CST report finding that around three-quarters of all politically-motivated antisemitic incidents come from far-right sources. Note ‘politically-motivated’. Most antisemitic incidents are NOT ‘politically-motivated’. Next comes a quote from a World Jewish Congress Survey in 2016, that “90% of antisemitic tweets in the UK came from far-right perpetrators”.

Again we have the definition problem: That WJC study did NOT include the Israel-based antisemitism which is a speciality of the Left.

Next come Labour Party data. The Party stated that (as of February 2019) that just 453 members were in the queue for investigation for antisemitism or had been investigated. But Labour Against Antisemitism puts the real number far higher. As of February 2019 it had reported 1,200 cases since 2016.

Jewish Voice for Labour wants to mobilise this sham statistical study to persuade journalists (ahead of the EHRC announcement) that allegations of antisemitism in Labour are false and are designed to undermine Corbyn. Fortunately it is so shoddy that it will have the opposite effect.